How many times have you been invited to a kick ass makeout party full of swimsuit models and porn stars and Holy Taco editors and you have to be like “Oh, I can’t, I have polio” and then you stay home and make out with a room temperature ham –WHICH IS WHERE POLIO COMES FROM – and it’s all because you never learned how to kiss properly? It’s like your mouth is just a meaty, floppy disappointment hole that your dinner dribbles out of when you’re surprised by the latest plot twist in CSI: Miami Well no more, Jimmy! It’s time to learn the majestic art of mouth love. But like, not that kind of mouth love. The less porny kind.

The Cheek Brush

Strictly speaking, this isn’t even a make out. This is the weak shit you do with family members. Unless you make out with family members in which case you are an A list playa, which is to say gross. Don’t make out with family, no matter how pretty your cousin is.

The Cheek Brush needs to be included here as a measuring tool, though. If your special someone (maybe you call them your hump mitten) is only giving you the cheek brush, that is what could be considered a kiss but also maybe they’re just wiping off chicken grease on your face, then they probably are not down. Down to what? You know what. High five!

Dry Lippin’

This is your standard model of a kiss. This is what two guys on SNL probably do if the script calls for a gay kiss. You have a mouth, they have a mouth, your faces try to occupy the same place at the same time but unlike Timecop things don’t get sloppy, just the opposite, it’s dry and lame. There’s no passion in this make out so if your lady friend accepts your lipular advances with a tight mouthed dry lipper response, you may as well shake her hand and then go masturbate.

The Dry Lipper is also good if you’re so damn old you can’t spare the precious moisture you’d lose in a more passionate kiss, but like back in the day you guys used to face hump all the time. It’s just that now you don’t have it in you to be so nasty and even if you did, it’d desiccate your flesh and maybe you’d break a hip.

The Lip Slurp

Now we’re getting nasty and you like it, don’t you? Yeah you do. You brazen little hussy. The Lip Slurp is what goes on when you kiss and you get the idea in your head that you should be eating more of your partner’s face than you were before. So your lips meet and then blurp! You just sucked some lip into your mouth. Or maybe, as a nice surprise, they did it to you. It’s oddly pleasant in its way but watch out if your friend is chewy. Because you can bite that lip but remember, don’t try to eat the damn thing because it’s still part of someone else’s visage.

The Tasting Tray

Oh doctor, we got the goods now. This is where your tongue shows up. Yeah, it’s not just for cleaning off the top of that ketchup bottle, your tongue is pretty advantageous to a wicked make out session. Sometimes called “French kissing” or “The Sneaky Ham Steak,” you need some mouth open, grunty passion to make this work properly as you slip your tongue into the other’s mouth and swirl it about a bit like your tongue lost its keys in a friend’s house and now it’s trying to find them without disturbing too much. You can also partake of a bit of lip licking and feel free to see what it’s lick to lick their tongue, that’s like meta-tasting.

Tongue Humper

The riskiest but most rewarding move in all of making out, this is where you basically set your genitals on a shelf for a sec and opt to have sex using only your faces. Your have to make sure your partner is in to this fully because if you slip from a little French kiss into a full on mouth exploration with tongues a-flapping and they are not down for it you are instantly going to change from a viable sexual partner to one of those alien face-hugging butts in their eyes and you don’t want that because as perverted as those things are, no one really wanted to make out with one.

Assuming your partner doesn’t have a preference to keep making out a discrete and sanitary affair then have at it. This is the only occasion in your life when you can full on suck on another human’s tongue without being a serial killer and you may as well take advantage of that.